Catastrophes and Diagrams: Deleuze on Painting
Sven-Olov Wallenstein
In the spring of 1981 Gilles Deleuze gave a course on painting, parts of which would later the same year find their way into the monograph on Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation.[1] Thanks to the careful editorial work of David Lapoujade the course is now available as Sur la peinture,[2] and it provides us with a more encompassing framework for the work on Bacon, as well as with an overview of some of the general ideas on art and aesthetics that would also become crucial in the books on cinema, L’image-mouvement (1983) and L’image-temps (1985), as well as providing parts of the groundwork for the analysis of Leibniz and the baroque in Le Pli (1988).
Deleuze’s point of entry is a declaration of ignorance and modesty—which to be sure is contradicted by many passages in the following. His proposal is not to apply readymade philosophical concepts to artworks, but rather, as he says at the outset, to explore the “possibility that painting might have something to give to philosophy,” something “that only painting can provide” (17), and to “form concepts that have a direct relation to painting, and to painting only” (18). This is not a quest for essence, a unity that would subsume particulars, instead it is a way of tracing out encounters between concepts and the sensible and trying to develop what they can give us. And yet there is an obvious tension—which is not unique to Deleuze but can be found in virtually all philosophies of art—between the general and the specific. It is undoubtedly so that personal preferences in many places intervene in a way that might seem abrupt, and that such judgments of “taste” (a term that Deleuze would surely reject) sometimes seem simply idiosyncratic. But in the end, they cannot be avoided: like most of us, he writes about what moves him, what forces him to think, what makes it worthwhile to think, and if one does not necessarily subscribe to his occasionally hasty judgments, or to the highly selective canon that guides him, there is no need to be annoyed: following his thoughts on what he does appreciate is an adventure in itself.
Catastrophes
The first notion proposed is that of catastrophe, defined by Deleuze as the moment when a structure enters a state of disequilibrium (the inspiration here comes from Paul Claudel’s L’oeil écoute) where things fall, collapse, and are overturned. It is not a question of representation—avalanches, storms, shipwrecks—but of something inherent in the act of painting, as in the case of Turner, who indeed painted many catastrophes in the narrow sense, but whose later phase shows us the dissolution of forms, as if shapes emerged from a hellish fire only to return again. Referring specifically to Turner’s Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843), but also to Cézanne, Klee, and van Gogh, Deleuze proposes that catastrophe should not be seen as negative, but as a giving birth to armature and color, both of which require that chaos be tempered.
William Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis , 1843
Texts and statements by painters are however equally import sources for Deleuze’s claims. Drawing on an account of conversations with Cézanne, he quotes the painter as saying that he would like to “paint space and time so that they become the forms of sensibility for colors, for I sometime imagine colors as noumenal entities, living ideas, beings of pure reason.”[3] While the Kantian vocabulary is surely an invention of the interlocuter Joaquim Gasquet, Deleuze (here closely following Henri Maldiney)[4] in this sees a crucial idea, that chaos is transformed through a catastrophe, which in fact precedes the painterly act: giving birth to armature and color, it is the beginning of a world, “the virginal state of the world,” as Gasquet has the painter say.
If color sometimes seems to take precedence in Deleuze’s account, there is just as much a need for structure, armature, the “second genesis of the eye” (the opposition at times seems to resuscitate the academic discourse of drawing from Vasari onward, in which the rationality of disegno is counterposed to the visceral impact of colore), which always threatens to dissolve once more into confusion. Armature and color must work together for color to “rise up,” instead of plunging into mere grisaille. This genesis, Deleuze adds, is not just a question of space, but a “synthesis of time” (36) in which the pre-pictural condition is brought into the work.
In the case of Klee, chaos appears as the absolute, marked by a grey point from which everything emerges, a process of “cosmogenesis” that leads from a first point that constitutes the border to chaos, to the doubling of the point that allows the spatial dimensions to unfold. For Bacon, genesis is rather a struggle against clichés, the task of clearing away everything that is already there on the canvas, which is his version of the catastrophe, and which he labels a diagram.[5] The diagram is a zone of “cleaning away” (nettoyage), effacing, a removal of traits that introduces the “distances of Sahara” in the portrait.[6] Together, these examples display the three facets of the diagram: it sets out from a pre-pictorial state then transformed through the act of painting, which ushers in the result. Here too there is an obvious tension between the general and the specific: while the three aspects of diagram are specific to each painter, the process can still somehow be accounted for in terms of a “diagram.”
Gerard Fromanger, Le Kiosque, 1973
A consequence of this is the rejection that everything would start from a void, the anxiety of the blank page, which Deleuze dismisses as mere “stupidity” (54). The opposite is true: there is already too much there, in our heads, on the page, on the canvas, and the struggle is rather how to get rid of the clichés that offer themselves as a facile resource. Circumventing a long tradition of debates on the relation between photography and painting, in art criticism at least since Baudelaire’s virulent attacks on the mechanization of vision, and playing on the word cliché (which in French also means photographic negative), Deleuze cites the case of Gérard Fromanger, whose work sets out from snapshots, which are then projected on to the canvas, and subjected to color variations that here take on the role of diagram as a cleansing.
Michelangelo, Todo Doni (Holy Family), around 1506
In Cézanne there is fight too, although of a different kind: the task is to grasp the “pictorial fact,” “the fact of the apple” (65) that flows into his portraits (“Madame Cézanne is a sort of apple”, ibid). The motif is not what matters, it is rather treated with an indifference that Deleuze traces all the way back to Michelangelo’s disregard for the commands of papal authority. This “fact” can come in different shapes, but it is generally opposed to the kind of storytelling that breaks up the pictorial unit into multiple narrative instances: in Cézanne’s Bathers there is no story to be told, only the circular form that unites the bodies, just as the three figures in Michelangelo’s Holy Family are joined in a singular serpentine movement, one and the same curvature (the distinctive echoes in this of Lessing’s Laokoon are surely not fortuitous). The most important source for these claims is however Bacon’s insistent rejection of narrative and figuration, which otherwise would seem to be salient features of his work and have spawned a plethora of psychological interpretations. For Bacon, the task is to capture those invisible forces that act upon the body, not to identify forms—a torso, a head, a syringe—but to trace zones of deformation that makes identities enter zones of indiscernibility. Here, as well as in many other passages, Deleuze refers us to Klee’s famous formula: “art does not render the visible, but renders visible” (“Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar”).”[7] Bacon’s contorted bodies, isolated in fields of color, crouching on beds, chairs, and mattresses, display such forces and constitute a kind of “mannerism,” manners of taking on and losing form instead of a form imposed on an inert matter.[8] Sometimes caught up in descending movements, as in the meat descending from the bones in the variations on the crucifixion, sometimes as if escaping from their bodies in an outward movement from the mouth (the famous Popes are not a depiction of horror, as Bacon underlies, but are about the scream and the mouth), or by way of a vomit that pushes the body out of itself through one of its orifices, as in Figure at a Washbasin.
Diagrams
Francis Bacon, Sleeping Figure, 1959
While the diagram is specific to each artist, Deleuze suggests that it can be accounted for though five key features so as to form a “concept that is proper to philosophy” (97)—and here the tension between general and specific obviously surfaces. First, as we have seen, the diagram sets up a bridge between chaos and germ, it marks the passage from non-order to proto-order. Second, it is based in the manual dimension, which is opposed to the visual; it liberates the hand from the submission to the eye, and the painting from the easel, which is essentially tied to the idea of the window. Third, because of the dethroning of the visual model, it privileges the “spot” or “stain” (tache) and the “draw” (trait) over colors and lines; the trait is not yet a line, Deleuze writes, or like a line that changes direction at every point. Together these three aspects constitute a fourth aspect, a rejection of resemblance (which is not the same as abstraction, a term that Deleuze perceives as caught in a misleading opposition to figuration); the pictorial fact is not a representation, but a presence in no need of any ulterior justification. Fifth, and finally, while this diagram is something that the painting must pass through to succeed it must not take precedence, which would result either in a return to chaos out of which nothing emerges, or in a reduction to a minimum, as in the case of a geometry that in the end turns the diagram into a code that remains exterior to painting.
But, Deleuze asks, echoing many debates underway at the time of his lectures to which he however pays no attention, why should we bother about painting today? Has it not been rendered obsolete—and, we could add, why would the diagram be specifically tied to painting among the other visual arts? Why pose these questions to paining a time when the borders between the arts were becoming increasing porous, even though these transformations had often started out from painting, but taking into a much more encompassing terrain? For Deleuze, it is however painting that, by finding new ways of dealing with the diagram, is able to take on an increasingly chaotic world and extract something from it. This takes place in many ways: in creating a spiritual world based in a code (Kandinsky), in descending as close as possibly to chaos and extract a particular rhythm (Pollock), or, as in what Deleuze here feels tempted to call the “moderate way,” to “measure chaos,”, not by resuscitating the figurative, but by extracting a “Figure” (123). This would be the way of Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gaugin, on which Deleuze later in the monograph places Bacon, for whom the extraction of a Figure is deemed essential.[9]
Picking up arguments from Michael Fried (“Three American Painters,” 1965) Deleuze notes how Pollock’s line does not delimit anything but tends to become identical to the surface; there are no contours, only lines that relate to themselves. Similarly, in Morris Louis, Deleuze—once more drawing on Fried—perceives a color that does not delimit; the application of paint by a roller produces a halo effect that escapes the function of creating outlines. Apart from Fried, the inspiration here also comes from Wilhelm Worringer, whose writings on Gothic art provide Deleuze with a conception of an expressionism that eschews psychological connotations of inside-outside: the septentrional line, opposed to the organic, classical form, unchained and erring, constitutes an expressionism of the inorganic, even a vitalism of the organic; it produces something informal, a “pictorial materialism in a pure state” (136) that is an aim, not a starting point. It is a painting by the hand, a manual expressionism. This is why Deleuze can claim that true abstraction, unlike the one that delimits forms, triangles, squares etc., is expressionism, as in Pollock and Louis, whereas geometric modes remained tied to a vestigial representation.
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950
For Deleuze this truly abstract expressionism—if we take the term in a rather different sense than in the American debates, and particularly so in the case of Clement Greenberg’s idea of it as a conquering of a space of “pure opticality”[10]— results from a tilting of the vertical to the horizontal, to the ground, in which the model easel-eye ceases to be operative. This is in fact what Leo Steinberg once, no doubt somewhat incidentally citing Rauschenberg as his prime example, called a shift from the modernist game of surface and illusion, from Greenberg’s “flatness,” to the “flatbed” that characterized the postmodern situation.[11] The postmodern, however, is a term that for Deleuze would be wholly pointless, since this tilting is one possibility among others in diagrammatic space in general, not anything like a singular historical caesura. The three versions of the diagram that he proposes—the manual, the digital, and the “moderate” (which obviously does not imply any kind of compromise)—are rather like choices within a logical combinatorics, not located along a historical axis. Thus, if the abstraction of expressionism probes the manual space, the other form of abstract art championed by Kandinsky is not situated as a—or the, as in most art historical account—historical origin to which all later development would respond, instead it only one particular move taking him in the direction of a code based in discrete unities with binary relations akin to language; it is one option among many. It is by pursuing its particular logic, whose binarism eventually gives rise to a geometricism that precisely subordinates the hand to the eye, that Mondrian installs an optic space for a “painting of a human being without hands” (158).
Deleuze’s departure the linear discourse of the “No Longer Possible” that has fueled innumerable debates on the end, demise, exhaustion etc. of painting ever since the first encounter with photography in the mid nineteenth century, should not simply be understood as a matter of personal taste; or, if it is that too, this is because it is an integral part of his thought, and it mirrors his take on the history of philosophy, which opposes the various forms of historical narratives unfolding from Hegel to the later Husserl and Heidegger, with their claims about an end, either as completion of a teleology (Hegel and Husserl), or a final gathering that prepares a different approach to thought (Heidegger).[12] For Deleuze, painting will just as little as philosophy cease to be relevant because of some inner necessity or historical logic, but only if we are lazy enough to stop practicing it, if we cease to develop it through new diagrammatic inventions. Even though that path eventually leading up to Bacon is what is given most attention, probably because the lectures would gradually turn into a particular monograph, which produces certain tensions in Deleuze’s treatment, none of the three diagrams should be taken as superior to the others, none is the origin or teleological solution of problems posed in the others; each constitutes an avenue of its own. And yet, as we will see, there are preferences involved here, not necessarily ones of taste, but ones that derive from Deleuze’s philosophy, which seems to draw him close to certain versions of the diagram, as if thought and painting, concept and intuition, here would enter into a particular proximity.[13]
Histories of space and color
In the third version of the diagram, in which we find both Cézanne and Bacon, it is neither the hand nor the eye that organizes the painting, instead it is the tension between them that gives rise to a “third eye” (162) and constitutes the “purely diagrammatic position” (163). In spite of the earlier refusal of essence, this nevertheless allows him to propose a “definition” (ibid), of painting, albeit surrounded by question marks, as the “analogical language par excellence” (164), which seems to relegate both manual and optical to a secondary position. This analogical language neither proceeds by similitudes (as in photography), nor by relations of dependence (as between a transmitter and a receiver), but by modulation, accents, and intonations that escape the binarization of the code. To apply the code to the analogical, Deleuze says, would be the “genial” (175) operation of optical-abstract painters, yet a genius that somehow seems to remain subordinate, an act of “grafting” (205) a structure of oppositions on to a substrate: “every code is in fact a code grafted on to an analogical flux” (207), and the latter is what defines the aesthetic domain. “To paint is to modulate” (175), Deleuze states, to modulate light and color on the surface, which indeed brings us close to that type of claim about essence that was initially rejected.
In modulation, resemblance is what is produced: neither a molding that obeys an extern similitude, nor takes place from the inside out as in the organic sphere, but a continuous process without predetermined end and initial model,[14] which can be carried out in multiple ways. If there is a starting point that assumes the place of the model—a “signal” (209, Deleuze says, in the vocabulary of informatics and telecommunication that he here draws on—it is space itself, or even space-time, all of which together produces the “Figure” (210), a resemblance more profound than any particular resemblance, the thing in its presence on the canvas.
This space-time is however changing, which is why there is a history, or sociology, as Deleuze says, of art, drawing on Alois Riegl: history as a history of the different senses of space, of which Deleuze provides a few apercus. Overturning the deeply ingrained image of Greek thought as the invention of stable essences beyond the flux of appearances, he ascribes this operation to the Egyptians (whose precedence Plato occasionally seems to accept; see Timaeus 22b). The contour isolating the figure on a plane that fuses figure and ground gives rise to the bas-relief, and a specific understanding of the folding of clothes and textiles that Deleuze (once more following Riegl) traces at some length. In a somewhat dizzying historical leap, Deleuze finds a trace of Egypt in Bacon: his paintings are made of flat fields, round contours that isolate the figures and yet remain independent, shallow depths: Figure, contour, fond constitute the three elements that would become the organizing features in Bacon’s logic of sensation.
In this history of space, the coming apart of the planes was a major event, instituting the dimension of foreground and background—a conversion to a Greek world not of light but of light subjected to form. There is a series of revolutions in space, in which forms would acquire the possibility of emerging from the ground, projected from the ground ,as in Byzantine art, just a later, in the Renaissance and onward, there will emerge unities of various sorts that exist in relation to manifolds, and later an art of the in-between, as in the Dutch masters, or more radically in Rembrandt, where “each person has a particular way of belonging to the fond” (289). Just like the different diagrams, none of these spaces constitute a progression, an advance toward something more complete; each is a world, each a fullness of sense, to be sure with many connections to past forms that can be reactivated and enter into new constellations.
The history of spaces is like a history of thought. The Greek invention of philosophy, which takes us from the sage to the one who loves wisdom, is just as much as transformation of art: “It is a change of space, of time, of elements, it is a change in the whole conception of art: the essence becoming organic, i.e., and essence grasped in the moment when it is incarnated in the flux of phenomena” (268), not a departure from this world towards a non-worldly sphere of stable forms, as a too hasty reading of Plato will lead us to believe. It is a world of participation in various degrees, of rhythm, rhythmos, which should be taken as a unit in temporal variation (as analyzed in a famous essay by Emile Benveniste).[15]
In parallel to this, there is a history of color, to which Goethe’s Theory of Colors provides a guide, with its analysis of color as the darkening of light, inseparable from movement and dynamics as they fuse and mix, in a process of darkening and being lit up. There is a genesis of colors, of values and tones, arising from a dark fond (a theme that would be developed later in Deleuze’s study of Leibniz and the fold, where it accounts for the passage from unconscious perceptions in the fuscum subnigrum to conscious ones) and making possible the art of the in-between that reaches an apex in Rembrandt. In this history f colorism, which is opposed to polychromy (colors subordinated to light and form), and passes through Delacroix’ “hatches,” Turner, and then impressionism as the first cases of pure colorism, we eventually arrive at the problem of colorism and flesh (chair), which is at the core at the phenomenology of art in Merleau-Ponty and Maldiney. This, Deleuze, suggests, is a specifically modern problem: how to render the flesh, which is the very core if life. Here we once more encounter Bacon, where the color is distributed in three orders of the contour-round, the fond, and the broken tones of the Figure. Color gives rise to the third eye, not in the brain, but in the nervous system, which will be the lesson of Bacon and the logic of sensation.
[1] Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Seuil, 2002 [1981]), henceforth cited as FB with page number.
[2] Sur la peinture, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2023). All further page references in the text are to this edition.
[3] Emile Bernard et al, Conversations avec Cézanne (Paris: Macula, 1978), 123.
[4] See Maldiney, Regard parole espace (Lausanne: Éditions L’Age d’homme, 1973).
[5] This term would later become crucial in Deleuze’s book on Foucault, where it denotes the general way in which the singular points of power relations are aligned, with the Panopticon prison as the most famous case.
[6] “Sahara” also provides the name for Mireille Buydens’s important, yet strangely overlooked work on Deleuze’s philosophy of art, which focuses on the idea of form as a continual formation-deformation, connecting it to his interpretation of Leibniz; see Buydens, Sahara: L’esthétique de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Vrin, 1990).
[7] Paul Klee, “Schöpferische Konfession,” drafted in 1918 under the title “Über Grafik,” first published 1920 in Kasimir Edschmid’s Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit, repr. in Klee, Das bildnerische Denken: Form- und Gestaltungslehre, ed. Jürg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1981), 76. Klee’s statement has been abundantly commented on from various philosophical points of view, but is ultimately rooted in a perception of nature, which in Klee’s case involves a cosmological vision; see Reiner Wiehl, “Philosophie der Kunst und Philosophie der Natur im Bildwerk Paul Klees,” in Guttorm Fløistad (ed.)m Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007). Wiehl draws Klee close to the philosophy of nature of Whitehead, who is a crucial reference in Deleuze’s attempt to develop a modern conception of the event in the wake of Leibniz; see Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), chap. VI.
[8] Here too, this concept has its background in Leibniz, where manners of being, forms as the temporary result forces, replace the Aristotelian dualism of form and matter; se Le Pli, chap IV.
[9] In the monograph on Bacon (FB 12), Deleuze also draws on Lyotard’s concept of the figural in Discours, figure. For Lyotard the figure remains on the level of form, perception, and recognition, whereas the figural descends into the space of affects and forces, and ultimately points to the matrix, the primary process as pure dispersal. Deleuze’s Figure, as a way of capturing forces (FB chap. 8), retains many of the characteristics of Lyotard’s conception; for the figural in Lyotard, see my “Discours, figure 50 Years After: Lyotard, Adorno, and the Critical Line.” https://www.sitezones.net/articles/discours-figure-50-years-after
[10] Deleuze here explicitly opposes the interpretations of Greenberg and Fried, both of which stress the element of opticality in Pollock: “What is formidable in Pollock, something striking, is that this is the first time that a purely manual line is liberated from all visual subordination.” (147).
[11] Steinberg is not referenced here, but is late credited in Le Pli, 38.
[12] See Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), chap. IV.
[13] Similarly, on one level he appears to understand the question posed in his final work, “what is philosophy?“ as demanding a descriptive answer: philosophy is the creation of concepts, and he exemplifies this with thinkers that in earlier contexts are positioned as opponents, Plato, Descartes, Kant. On another level, which is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the first, there are certain creations that seem preferable to others, particularly those in which the act of creation is explicit, instead of being located in a sphere that already prefigures the result, making the philosopher into a recipient of something that has already occurred elsewhere. This would be the respective positions of the three grand rivals: contemplation (the idea is already given), reflection (thought as secondary to other domains, for instance science), and communication (philosophy has the task of removing obstacles for a transparent discourse that in one way or another has been distorted by external factors).
[14] This idea is pervasive in Deleuze, and he generally draws on Gilbert Simondon, but here also on Bernard’s account of a statement by Cézanne: “One should not say to model, but to modulate.” (Conversations avec Cézanne, 36)
[15] “La notion de ‘rythme”’dans son expression linguistique“, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris, Gallimard, 1966). In the book on Bacon, the concept of rhythm organizes the sequence of singular figures, couples, and triptychs in Bacon, with the triptych as the final and most complex form. To paint the sensation in the singular figure means to capture a vibration, which in the couples becomes a resonance, in the triptychs a “forced movement” that gives us an “impression of Time” (FB 71), folds back on the preceding levels and distributes their functions. The whole chapter is shot through with explicit and implicit references to Proust, not least concerning the idea of Time with a capital T, as the highest level from which we can return and retrace the logic of the earlier stages.
